When visiting Barking and Dagenham it is possible for Londoners from different parts of town to imagine that they have slipped back in time. That’s partly about architecture, because this piece of the eastern suburb mosaic, slotted between Newham, Redbridge, Essex-minded Havering and the north side of the Thames, is still so visually synonymous with the 30,000 homes of the famous Becontree estate, a huge public housing development, conceived, in the words of Municipal Dreams, “in the brief, post-Great War coupling of hope and fear. Homes fit for heroes and the concern that those very heroes might succumb to Bolshevism in 1919”.

It’s also about accents: the London style of speech cemented in national sentiment by apples, pears and the spirit of the Blitz, but now getting scarce in Shoreditch, still greets the ear pretty often round here, including in the Town Hall. And then there’s attitude, which is where Barking and Dagenham can be misunderstood. I asked council leader Darren Rodwell if he thinks the borough has an image problem. “Absolutely,” he says. “It’s that we’re white racists who work at Fords. But that is snobbery. The reality is, we’ve got one of the best communities in London – if not the best.”

Another, and indisputable, part of Barking and Dagenham’s reality is that, contrary to any impression of its being suspended in some by-passed London yesterday, it is going through truly profound change and has been for at least as long as the local authority has existed.

“For most of the life of the borough the council has had to cope with the consequences of de-industrialisation,” writes Tony Travers in his indispensable London’s Boroughs at 50. He describes the need to re-train the local workforce and attract new sources of employment as “a continuous challenge” in an area with a long tradition of young people leaving school early and going straight into jobs of a type that used to be on their own doorsteps but aren’t any more.

For 70 years the giant Ford production plant Rodwell referred to was Dagenham’s employment core and community anchor. It cranked out its first vehicles in 1931, a few years before the completion of the great Becontree “new town”, and grew into a vast production line of motor-Americana whose legendary livery loomed above the A13.

In 2002, all but a small bit of it closed. In the meantime, Barking and Dagenham’s population had altered greatly. And during this century its shifts have been, to use the council’s word, “unprecedented”. According to the 2011 census it rose by 22,000 during the preceding ten years, an increase of 13.4%. It grew radically younger during that period too and more ethnically mixed than it had ever been. Human turnover has been huge.

All of this has required adjustments, stirred anxieties and presented an electoral opportunity to the British National Party, which it seized by winning eleven seats in the borough elections of 2006. Labour stayed in control, as it has ever since 1964. But it was stung into mounting a sustained counter attack, which saw Margaret Hodge hold her Barking parliamentary seat in 2010, crushing BNP leader Nick Griffin in the process. The BNP presence on the council was ended at the borough elections held on the same day. They haven’t made a comeback. Rodwell, though, seems well alive to why some of the borough’s residents made them briefly strong.

“We’ve got a 12th century church, a 14th century pub and a 17th century vicarage,” he said, driving me through the Dagenham Village conservation area. “They decimated it in the 1960s and 1970s.” He pointed out of the window: “That was my nan’s place, there.” Further on, we reached an industrial site where the May and Baker pharmaceutical company used to be. “Great people who worked there,” Rodwell remarked. “If it hadn’t been for them we wouldn’t have had Winston Churchill.” That’s because the drug that did wonders for his bacterial pneumonia in 1942 was invented there. Moving on, Rodwell, took us past a health and fitness club (“When it was built, this was the Sterling machine gun factory”) and then we were in the heart of Barking , served by Bobby Moore Way (no commentary required).

There was a purpose behind highlighting these landmarks of history. “I can’t say to people that we can keep the streets the same as they were when I was growing up,” said Rodwell, 46. “And nor do I want to. There were some good bits about it and some not so good bits. When I was a lad growing up here we didn’t have 137 different cultures. We have today. Now, some of that is good. Some of that, people will say, is not so good. Some people are concerned by it. If they are people who don’t want to move along with that change in society, then we can only support them the best we can. We can’t make them want to change and I understand the anxiety. But, actually, a hundred years ago, none of this was here.”

By “this” Rodwell meant, well, nearly everything standing in the area today, including a great deal of the council housing that went up in the decades after the Becontree was completed, especially that constructed after World War II. He isn’t sentimental about it. “As I see it, people deserve better than this,” he remarked of one cluster of homes put together in the years when Moore was at his footballing peak. Of the council housing in general constructed during that era, when Labour and Conservative national governments competed to get the most built, he says: “It was good for its time. It was good for the working classes that came out of the slums of London and for the immigrants that came over from Ireland or Eastern Europe, which we had a lot of.”

But now: “Historically, the problem with the borough is we’ve only had one type of housing, which was for one type of community. We were the subservient workforce of Fords and other industries.” This, Rodwell believes, militated against openness and ambition. “You didn’t have to be educated, and you didn’t have to aspire to want to do better. It was all laid on a plate for you. That’s a safe place to be - when you’re being told what to do, when to go on holiday, how to live your life. You’re cradled. Well, we’re not in that world any more. And after eight decades, in my opinion, it led to the BNP.”

Before becoming a councillor, Rodwell had worked for the charity DABD as an adviser and advocate for benefits claimants. He became Barking and Dagenham leader in May 2014. It was just after the council elections of that year in which Labour repeated its clean sweep of 2010, dashing the hopes of Ukip, by then seen as its main challenger, even though the borough would become one of just five out of 32 where voters wanted to leave the EU. Rodwell told his local paper he would promote “social responsibility” in the borough and make “community” his main focus. He also pledged to do all he could to combat the effects of government cuts, labelling the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition the “worst disaster”. There is a stress on education too. Coventry University is to set up a campus in Dagenham Civic Centre next year and offer courses in accountancy, engineering, policing, It and more.

The Rodwell recipe is a distinctive combination of protective innovation and a desire to foster change from within, articulated as an independent, working-class philosophy. “I don’t class myself as a politician,” he said. “I class myself as a community champion. The job of the council is to facilitate where the community wants to go, and then to get the investment in, whether it be public or private. As long as I do that, as long as I get that right, I don’t need any posh people with letters after their names and bank balances to prove it telling me how I or the rest of the community should live our lives. It’s really, really simple.”

Rodwell’s housing policies demonstrate his beliefs and approach. Last year, Barking and Dagenham became a private sector landlord by buying a block of newly-built flats and creating its own company, Barking and Dagenham Reside, to manage them. Some of the properties are for social rent, others are for people who will never qualify for it but can’t afford to buy and are priced at 80% of local market rates. Rodwell deputy Saima Ashraf, who is also the council’s cabinet member for community leadership and engagement, called it “a win-win for our council, taxpayers, residents and Generation Rent”. Conservative London Assembly member Andrew Boff, a local resident, praised it as “fantastic”. Rodwell says the council’s private rented homes begin at levels affordable to people on the London Living Wage: “On £19,000 a year you can get a one-bedroom flat.”

The next big innovation, introduced earlier this year, bestowed on traditional secure council tenants a “right to invest”. It enables them to convert to shared ownership by purchasing between 25% and 70% of the home they live in. The mechanism gives people who cannot afford to exercise their right to buy a financial stake in their homes without the council losing its stock. It was also designed to protect tenants against the government’s planned “pay-to-stay” policy, now dropped, which would have entailed tenants with incomes above a certain level having their rents raised. If occupants want to sell their share of their home, the council will get first refusal.

Rodwell says he has “no problem with people wanting to better their lifestyles, but it shouldn’t be done the way it’s being done at the moment - at a cost to the wider community”. In contrast to Right to Buy, he sees “right to invest” as another means of nurturing aspiration and community stability at the same time. It’s an aspect of his desire to increase tenure mix, of which he is an uncomplicated advocate. Barking and Dagenham has high levels of social housing, a category whose definition in Rodwell’s mind includes buy-to-let properties where other councils place people from their waiting lists. For him, this adds to the weight of sustaining neighbourhoods containing a lot of people on low incomes. “That’s two-thirds of the borough,” Rodwell says. “When you’ve got 70% on some form of benefit, you’ve got to get greater diversity. Without it, you get seen as a dumping ground of London. That’s not good for the residents here, or those who are placed here. We need to support people here that want to progress. You’ve got to make sure of is that we can still build homes for the aspirational working class.”

There’s also that legacy of poorly-built post-war housing to keep on dealing with. After collecting me from Dagenham East station Rodwell took me to Dagenham’s nearby Leys estate, where he was shown around by people from developer Mulalley. It was not the Leys built in the 1960s. In 2009, the council received a petition from its residents, asking for delayed improvement work under Labour’s Decent Homes programme to be carried out. The council lacked the cash and decided to redevelop.

In March 2013, bulldozers moved in. Phase one of the work is now complete. Of the 89 new homes, 19 are for market sale and the other 70 for affordable rent, half at 50% of local market rents, half at 65%. Phase two will produce another 69 homes, all for rent at much the same split. They are tenure blind and renters on the old estate are entitled to return. It’s another Reside project. Rodwell is pleased with the quality of the work: “I look at it really, really simple. Regeneration today should be the heritage of tomorrow. The Becontree estate was built in 12 years. We will soon celebrate its hundredth year. Why? Because it was good quality housing with the infrastructure required to make a community. And it’s made a very good community.”

At first, you couldn’t get a house on the Becontree unless you had a job. Today’s contemptuous stereotypes of council house tenants could not have taken hold in those days. I asked Rodwell if he regards his promotion of mixed tenure as a way of restoring a mixture of residents on estates that Barking and Dagenham has largely lost. “Agreed. Yes. Exactly that,” he replied. “What you want is what you’ve just seen at the Leys. There will be a complete mix of people who are hard-working Barking and Dagenham Londoners, who have pride in the job they do, but who will never have the same amount of money as people who can afford to buy. Why should they have anything less?”

At the Town Hall, Rodwell is happy to be photographed beside the portrait of the Queen that hangs on his office wall. Five years ago, he accepted her invitation to attend her garden party in recognition of his charity work. Last year, the monarch visited the borough as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations and was entertained by the legendary Dagenham Girl Pipers and Iqra Zaman, a 16-year-old self-taught pianist. Rodwell doesn’t mind who knows of his affection for the chief royal or the nation’s great arts institutions and cultural sites. He wants access to these to be free for UK citizens, but not for tourists, welcome though they are: “Make ‘em pay.”

He outlined another part of his vision for his borough’s evolution - encouraging local arts and culture. “For 80 years, high art was a Saturday night down the working men’s club,” he said. “But we have to be individuals. We have to stretch the mindset of what we can achieve and where we can go. People in Barking and Dagenham deserve what you get in Westminster. They deserve it because they’ve worked for it. There are people here who’ve wanted to express themselves for so long, but they were not allowed to because we had a conformist community.”

Barking and Dagenham Council promotional video for its arts and culture policies.

Local planning policy seeks to provide low cost ground floor spaces and work-live units for local artists and their small businesses. “We can adapt those for artists, micro-breweries, that sort of stuff,” Rodwell said. There are grander ambitions too. A year ago, the council spent £12m buying land on a local industrial site to pursue his aim of getting a film studio built there. The area has provided locations for big budget film and TV productions in recent years. Rodwell senses an opportunity. “Investors know we’re an ambitious council determined to realise the benefits of the creative industries for our economy and residents,” he told the Barking and Dagenham Post. London mayor Sadiq Khan joined him for a photo-op. He dropped by again in October: “In the 20th century Dagenham was known for Fords. In the 21st-century I think it can be known for film,” he said.

It seemed only right and proper to pull his leg: next thing he knew, I said, his “aspirational working class” Barking and Dagenham would be over-run with bicycling Guardian readers craving fancy coffee and organic veg; gentrification is already re-making Plaistow and Manor Park; the tide will crash upon Rodwell’s shores soon enough and neighbourhoods will go to the dogs.

“I have no problem with those people coming into the borough,” Rodwell replied, “as long as I can sit next to them reading the Mirror.” He points out that artists and small-scale brewers would be nothing new in the territory: “This was a Saxon space of innovation. I want to bring that ambition back.” Organic veg needn’t be out of place either: “We’ve got more allotments than any other London council. We’ve got a community growing space. So all this yuppie gentrification is actually, if you really want, going back in time to what the working class used to do. You’d have a hundred foot garden, split it up into three: a third for the animal, a third for the allotment and a third for the kids. That’s a very working class land use.”

What matters, he explained, is that “the people already here get the same opportunities to develop themselves instead of being priced out. We as a council are doing our utmost to make sure that doesn’t happen. Those live-work spaces, there will be a lower and an upper income stream for them. So once you’re established you won’t need that space any more and it can be passed on to the next aspirational working-class person.”

Rodwell’s distinction between gentrification, a transforming affluence from without, and aspiration, a transforming force from within, seems to capture his approach to the challenges of dealing with change that are faced be so many London boroughs in different ways. “What I want to see is true aspiration,” he says. “Because actually it’s the working class that normally, in the past, has given London its vibrancy. If you look at the arts, if you look at culture, if you look at music, architecture, any of it, it’s normally come from them.”

Earlier, we’d visited Barking Riverside, a vast stretch of Thames-side ex-industrial land that will eventually be home to 10,000 households (and the subject of separate article before too long). For now, the small part that’s been completed is a bit of a lost village, waiting to be found by long-awaited public transport links. But it is, nonetheless, part of the future of London as it pulses and grows and its centre of gravity shifts further east. Across the wide, grey river, in Bexley and Greenwich you can see the new Thamesmead too taking shape. East London is entering its latest stage of unending transition. There will be good change and bad change and all sorts that fall somewhere between. Darren Rodwell is but one among the many who will help to define the forms it takes. He knows what he wants. He also knows what he wants to avoid.

“You imagine a house with local government as its foundations. Local government has been eroded for decades and when you erode the foundations, the pillars start to shake. Now, what are the four pillars? The first pillar is housing. The second pillar is education. The third pillar is the welfare state and the fourth pillar is the NHS. Let’s look at those four pillars.

Housing? We built what we could and we built a lot of it for everyone and that was really important. You know, they went through a world war. The second thing was a right to a good education, up to university. Well, we’ve nearly privatised our education. That’s a disgrace. Thirdly, the welfare state. No one should ever starve in this country. How can it be right that we went from one food bank here to 12 in a matter of five years? That’s not good policy. That’s very bad policy. And the last one is the NHS. Well, do we have to talk about how that’s on its knees? So the foundations are eroded, the four pillars are shaking, and then we wonder why the roof of Europe falls in.

“I want a society where if Mrs Jones hasn’t collected her milk for a few days, a neighbour will know that Mrs Jones hasn’t collected her milk. What an indictment of our society when a local authority doesn’t know Mrs Jones hasn’t collected her milk, the neighbours don’t know Mrs Jones hasn’t collected her milk and her family that lives wherever they live hasn’t noticed either. That’s a really sad indictment of 21st century Britain.”

This article was updated on 6 December 2016 to include the council’s plans for building a film studio.